Deconstructing BCP 47

BCP 47 stands for Best Common Practice 47, and even without the acronym, the name alone means almost nothing. So, what is BCP 47?

BCP 47 is the current best practice for creating language codes. A language code is a text identifier that specifies a specific human language, and the code provides the means to define the language in terms of a basic language, a script used to write that language, and even a particular region in which the language is used. BCP 47 prescribes the code and its parts with enough precision to uniquely identify a natural, human language and distinguish it from other languages.

BCP 47 is a standard that uses other standards, and it prescribes how to combine those standards together to create a language code. BCP 47 is a combination of at least the following existing standards:

Why is this important to you in the internationalization or localization business? It is important because our industry requires common standards and agreement for how to communicate, transfer, and exchange language data. A BCP 47 tag is necessary to accurately identify language text across different applications and tools.

This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully it gives you a sense of the importance of this standard. When you need to tag data with a language identifier, you should seriously consider BCP 47 instead of any home-grown convention.

Having provided plenty of links in this post, I hope you’ll take some time to familiarize yourself with this important language tagging standard. Happy reading!